this lizard makes an excellent dynamite stick
by screaming internally
Summary: For most students of Auradon Prep, summer holidays involve dating, and beaches, movies and shopping. For Jane, it mostly involves trying not to be in the room when the dragon explodes. Or, Jane has a summer job. It's . . interesting. (T for language)
1. Chapter 1

**this lizard makes an excellent dynamite stick**

* * *

For most students of Auradon Prep, summer holidays involve dating, and beaches, movies and shopping. For Jane, it mostly involves trying not to be in the room when the dragon explodes.

Or, Jane has a summer job. It's . . interesting.

* * *

As was the usual tradition for Jane, two days after the end of the school year, she packed her things, said goodbye to her friends and loved ones, and then got on a train for five or six hours - depending on the circumstances of the train system that day - and went to another country for the next almost-three months.

See, she didn't have solely one parent, she just had one parent in Auradon.

Adrien Castle, PhD, Creator of the Anti-Magic Dome that sits over the Isle of the Lost and published Arcanologist and Historian, had moved to a new country - along with a solid two-thirds of what was formerly Auradon's magical population - when the Restriction of Magic, Cosmos Altering and Other Forces Act was implemented, the year of Jane's birth.

An outspoken political activist at the time, Castle had argued against the Act, stating that it was an infringement on the rights of fae beings. King Adam Goodwin, the reigning monarch of Auradon at the time, disagreed. Castle called him a fascist, broke Goodwin's nose, and then stormed out of Auradon City, settled the custody agreement with the mother of his child, Abigail Fairchild - more commonly known as the Fairy Godmother, Head of the Godmother's Association and then-recently-instated Headmistress of Auradon Prepatory Academy - and then left with the rest of the fae community.

Together, the exodus of beings had settled into a then-unoccupied valley in the northern area of the continent that Auradon was a part of. Coincidentally, that same valley was home to one of the world's largest collection of intercrossing ley lines (the lines of magical energy that intersect across the world). As a result of such a large population of fae beings in the valley and the intersecting ley lines, Castle's home was known as the Most Magical Place On Earth.

That's not hyperbole, or some title. It is literally the most magical place on earth. See, when magic is congregated in certain areas in large quantities, the magic needs to discharge itself. Trees randomly uprooting themselves and going for a walk was a common sight. Random vortexes of energy occurring at certain points of the year could set a calendar. Random creatures that had never been seen before and never would after occasionally prowled the streets. The last time Jane was in town for the summer, a random glowing cloud turned up, hovered over town and dropped the carcasses of dead animals for about an hour and a half, before floating away and dissipating in the wind*.

The valley, and the city it housed, was Jane's favourite place in the world.

And in it was Jane's favourite person in the world. Adrien Castle slouched against the psychedelically-painted hippie van in the car park of the train station. Standing at six-foot-three, his pale skin was covered in various tattoos depicting runes, passages from historical or magical texts, the images of various monsters that he'd studied, and in one small image, Jane's name and date of creation. He had dark blue eyes that gave one the reminder of the night sky, the dark brown hair that Jane had inherited, and an air of a man that had once been idealistic before being kicked in the teeth by the world, and therefore refused to have to deal with that again. He was wearing black jeans, steel-toed combat boots that had definitely been used in a couple fights, and a floral-printed button shirt in the same colours Jane wore to school every day.

It was a sight Jane only got to see a couple times a year, and she always loved it. Jane grinned as she exited the train station and walked towards her father, feeling happier and more relaxed than she had been in weeks. Her father's happiness at seeing her flooded Jane's senses, and she felt better at the sensation.

He greeted her with the words: "Hey, my sunshine."

Jane dropped her bags to a stop and threw herself into her father's waiting embrace. It was a firm hug, his bigger bulk enveloping Jane's smaller frame. His skin was warm, and Jane could feel herself relax. She was home.

* * *

During the car ride, Jane and her father caught up with each other, Jane telling him all the things that had happened since the last time she'd seen him, he telling her about his semester teaching at the local university and all the students he'd dealt with, from the excellent to the stupid to those _really_ suffering from College Syndrome. Jane could take a guess what those poor kids were dealing with, Charlie Charming was really feeling the effects of College Syndrome the last time she'd spoken to him - running almost four days on no sleep and barely anything but coffee had been effecting his temperament quite a bit.

"Does Roslin Smaug still need me this year?" Jane asked.

"Smaug is gonna need you every year for as long as she keeps that farm of hers going, and there's some shmuck willing to be paid to do it." said Adrien, keeping his eyes on the road, still keeping the smile he'd had since Jane had gotten off the train. "Apparently, that egg-separation thing you suggest last year worked beyond expectation. More than fifteen babies had made it through winter - although three of them died in the spring."

"I take umbrage at that title."

"What title?"

" _Shmuck_. I remind you, darling father," both of them were smiling now, at Jane's teasing tone, "that _you_ were the one that volunteered me for this. And I get paid a lot of money for it."

Adrien chuckled. "Janey, you get paid so much because if Smaug didn't, no sane person would be willing to put up with _that_ smell, or the drool, or the explosions that they'd have to clean up."

"So it's a job that isn't glamourous, and I make bank doing it. It's perfect for me. Madame Roslin Smaug of the Dragon Breeding Mansion knows how to get herself employees that know what they want out of life."

"And what you want is to smell like dragon shit?"

"I wanna be rolling in money by the end of this summer. That is a perfectly respectable thing to want out of life."

The father and daughter drove home, eventually starting to sing along to the radio.

* * *

Looking at her reflection, Jane took in her appearance.

For once entirely without makeup, Jane's complexion was a little different than her friends knew. Mostly it was the near-permanent bags under her eyes - sleep was not required for faeries, but it never hurt, and Jane's habit of going weeks without it had taken its toll years ago - and the freckles across her nose and the tops of her cheeks. Pale but distinctive, the blue dots scattered themselves across her face like a bunch of permanent markers that if there was one thing Jane was not, it was a human**. She'd gotten into the habit of covering them up early in her high school career, her classmates constant unease with her fae-ness did not need to be exacerbated by the very obvious reminder of what she was. Her ears and wings could be easily covered up by clothes and hair, but her freckles had been a different story, and as such, Jane had taken to liberal amounts of concealer and foundation to make sure her pale skin was as human-looking as possible.

She'd been considering ditching the cover-up for a while, as she was becoming more and more accepting of her differences from her peers, but over the years the make-up had seemed more of a shield, keeping her from scorn.

Either way, it was not her freckles that were the cause of her scrutiny. It was her hair.

After all the mess with Mal and her use of magic on Jane's hair, it'd been decided that Jane could learn hair spells for herself - just the one! - and Mal had to stop using magic on the people's appearances. That hadn't gone over well with some of the Royals at school, but Abigail was headmistress, and she'd announced it at assembly, and therefore the rule was law in the hall of Auradon Prep. Jane's hair, however, had been turned back into the neck-length bob it'd been for a few years, but it had grown down to her shoulders in the time since then. She was going to miss it, but there really was no choice.

Jane turned on her father's electric razor, and took it to her locks, the buzzing device sending her dark hair floating down to the floor.

* * *

Okay, before you question this, here's an explanation:

As previously explained, Jane spent her summers working with Madame Roslin Smaug at her dragon breeding enclosure, which inhabited Smaug's mansion. But the thing about dragons is, despite what any mythos would have you believe, they are not the fearsome, dangerous, gargantuan creatures everyone pictures. Most dragons may grow to be no bigger than a Golden Retriever dog, or Pit Bull. Most dragons are smaller than that, the size of house cats or birds. Being so small is one of the few reasons they can actually fly.

Whereas Fae beings with wings move around due to the fact that they are beings of magic, most dragons are in line with reptiles on the evolutionary scale, crossbreeding with magic only occasionally. The massive dragons of fairy tales are often the result of magicians and sorcerers and fae and witches messing about with magic and turning themselves - or something else - into fire-breathing monstrosities of scales and talons.

Regular dragons, often called 'swamp dragons' for the environment they originally inhabited, are small, unhappy creatures. Prone to eating _anything_ , their fires are provoked by those same ingested materials being broken down by the chemicals in their bodies and stomaches - dragons having a digestive system that more closely resembles a chemical processing plant than a stomach with organs - and their brains being almost entirely dedicated to keeping that digestive system functioning, thereby allowing ignition of gasses that the dragon exhales. However, those same chemicals that allow dragons their fire are constantly unbalanced, leaving the beast in the perpetual state of feeling ill and at the precipice of exploding into a very gory fireball.

Often, dragons loose this battle with their stomaches, creating a very digesting mess.

People who spend large amounts of their time with swamp dragons do not hold onto their hair for very long, especially when that hair is long in length.

(By the way, this is what happened to Jane her first summer working for Mme. Smaug. Her long hair had caught fire and had to be shaved off. It was very traumatic for the thirteen-year-old, and the pixie cut she'd gone back to school with and been promptly laughed at for having had not helped. Now Jane just shaved her head before her first day of work. It saved the fire extinguishers to be used on things that weren't attached to people.)

* * *

Lord Mumbardy the Third's watery, bulbous eyes blinked at Jane's approaching form, her steady gait a far cry from those that normally approached the large mansion. Normally, a person would be walking confidently toward the property, and then the smell would hit them. A _pleasant_ odour of dragon dung, rotted fruit and vegetables (to say nothing of the raw meat in the mansion) and the not-quite washed-off formerly-smouldering remains of Missus Esmeraude from last night often swayed guests from the dragon-breeding home.

Jane, however, had come to the house five days out of the week, for nine weeks for the last three years of her life. The smell, while still utterly repugnant, was one she was used to. Her wand was tucked into the specially-sewn pocket of her pants, she was wearing sturdy boots, and her head was freshly shaved. There was nothing in the mansion that she hadn't dealt with before.

Mme Smaug bred swamp dragons as pets, to be sold to the sort of people with more money than common sense who had a desire for exotic pets. The demand for own-able dragons was one of the only things that had kept the species from going extinct, mostly because dragons themselves could only be bothered breeding once per year, and half the eggs laid inevitably got crushed by nonchalant dragons, themselves. Female dragons are capable of laying three or four clutches of eggs over the summer period of the year - the high temperatures of the air, once coupled with the heat required for a dragon egg to be laid, was what drove the dragons into their breeding 'frenzy' - please remember, most of the animals cannot move without wanting to explode from pain (and most often do), so 'frenzy' is perhaps too strong a word - and dragons go from being vaguely-breathing scaly logs to vaguely-motivated single-minded buzz saws that sometimes exploded.

Jane's job was to help during the summer, feeding the beasts, noting the eggs and which ones actually made it to the point of hatching, making sure that the smell was not as bad as it could be - as with all stenches, heat tended to make it all a good deal worse than normal. Mme Smaug's last summer worker had been a college student who'd moved after graduation, and not many others had wanted the job at the time.

Jane's foot landed solidly on the stairs to the mansion, moving briskly up to the door. As she did, she ran a hand over the dull edges of Lord Mumbardy's flank, causing him to huff some smoke from his nostrils, before exhaling more smoke (with the addition of drool) from his mouth, exposing the soot-blackened teeth protruding from his mouth.

A normal start to her day, during the summer.

Jane couldn't wait.

* * *

All the dragons's descriptions - their bodies, how they function, all that - was taken from the late and great Terry Pratchett's novel _Guards! Guards!_ , which is an excellent novel that I recommend everyone read at least once.

I picture Adrien as Jon Bernthal in the film Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, where he plays a teacher. Google his pic, you'll know what I mean. I am working on a fic about him, but it isn't complete yet.

As for the valley, I imagine it as something of a cross-between Gravity Falls and Welcome to Night Vale, without the shady government. It just a really weird place, filled with really weird people. They're magic - it's weird by nature.

* Welcome to Night Vale, episode 2. _The Glow Cloud_.

** Kudos to , who came up with the idea of Jane having blue freckles

Let me know with reviews whether or not I should continue the tales of Jane's summer job, because I can't make up my mind.


	2. Chapter 2

There were talons digging into her face.

Jane slowly sat up, her concussion making her head ring, her sensitive ears distinctly unhappy. There were still talons in her face.

Slowly, she opened her eyes. One did not have the best sight, but that was less injury, and more the inky-mottled-blue-green scaly arm stretched over her face. Darling, then. He was fond of climbing on top of people, but he wasn't the most considerate of his claws and where he put them. On top of that, he was clingy, and had decided that Jane was his favourite.

Trying not to concentrate on the sharp claws embedded in her skin, Jane took stock of the room. Roslin was doing the same thing. "You alright?" she asked.

"I'm fine," the dragon breeder said. "Darling's on your head again."

"Yeah, I know." There were a couple small rivulets of blood starting to trickle down Jane's face, but her pain senses had decided to come back from their quick cigarette break, and the rest of her body had decided to make its complaints heard.

It had been the last moments of ol' Wickline, one of the oldest dragons Roslin had. He'd been about the size of a Schnauzer dog (about 34 centimetres in height, maybe seven kilograms in weight), had just turned twenty-three last summer. He'd been an interesting orange-brown colour, with lovely green eyes. Since Jane had taken her job back for the break, he'd been having worse stomach trouble than usual. Not an hour before Jane was thrown across the floor, Wickline had crawled - well, dragged himself - under a stack of wooden crates in the consistently-scorched yard. Jane had been working to get him out when . . She'd miss him. He'd easily held the title of 'Most Docile' of the house, due to his teeth and claws having been worn down to stubs over his long years.

He'd been a handsome dragon - most of the younger ones sold in the years of his prime had been his many, many offspring. It was unfortunate he'd exploded that way, in pain, hiding under wooden crates, waiting for the end.

Dragons are really stupidly-designed animals.

See, dragons distill something flammable from whatever they eat - with the exception of metals and igneous rocks (when you're a species that evolves in swampland, you can't afford to be picky eaters) - and the flame is ignited from whatever gasses are absorbed from that. Pretty much the only reason swamp dragons have come as far as they have through history is due to the lack of predators in their native habitat. Fuel is supplied to them by reliance on constant stomach trouble. Living on constant chemical knife-edge means that one badly-timed hiccup ends in a smear on dirt.

Of course, furthering the species isn't helped by the fact that when nesting time came around, the females have less sense and mothering instinct than a toilet.

Honestly, knights and heroes were wasting their time whenever they went off to slay dragons. They just had to wait till the beast dropped dead from indigestion or blew itself up. Truly, they were just jackasses in metal cans, killing beasts that existed almost solely to die quick. Really, no swamp dragon was capable of terrorising anyone, except by accident. With eight stomachs and the effort it took to just stay alive, crawling across a room could be considered a stroke evolutionary luck.

There were worse pets a person could keep - as long as you kept your dragon in open, decently-to-well ventilated areas, and watched what they ate, dragons were not actually bad pets; just not common ones.

Mostly the turn off were - as with most uncommon pets - the upkeep. Dragon poo stank horribly (although made amazingly excellent fertiliser), and if you were going to be the kind of person who kept small pets to have them perch on your shoulder or in your bag, then you had to expect that same bad-smelling poop to end up where you don't want it. Dragons were lazy, and not fond of moving. They were pets that lounged, not animals that moved for fun.

Although Darling was proving to be a rebel. Jane having sat up, he'd twisted himself so that his claws were stuck in Jane's cheek, his arm stretched over her head, with his hind feet embedding themselves into the collar of Jane's jumpsuit. It was a natural fire-retardant suit, perfect for her work, but unfortunately, not study enough to keep dragon claws from ripping it. Darling's tail was wrapped around her neck, and his other arm had latched onto the left side of her jaw. She could feel his skull resting atop the pixie-cut of her hair, leaving his entire body to give off the impression of a small child trying to child a grocery store trolley. She sighed.

Roslin was moving now, checking on the rest of the dragons in the yard - Miss Buttercup, Lord Mumbardy the Third, Lord Mumbardy the Fourth, Mister Vimes, Lady Chesh, some others - all accounted for. Lady Chesh had apparently decided that the death of her house-mate was the perfect time for her to lay three eggs.

While Roslin cleaned up and Darling was comfortable gouging holes in Jane's face, Jane herself carefully extracted the eggs from Lady Chesh's backside, the Lady having decided that laying eggs was the easy part of her day and that moving was not necessary. Jane put the eggs in the specially heated basket kept just for the occasion and carried them to the incubator.

Well. It was more of a sauna. Roslin had made it out of a solarium in the east wing of her mansion, capable of holding up to fifty eggs at any one time, with special ramps and boxes placed around so that any new hatchlings would not smash any other eggs. Heating wires like the inside of a toaster ran through the walls and roof, keeping the eggs at a toasty fifty degrees celsius* at all hours of the day.

Exiting the incubator was like stepping from the fire and into the frying pan. As always, the summer heat was doing its job.

* * *

so, i made up my mind. there is no guarantee that this narrative is going anywhere, but i wanna do some stuff with this home-away-from-auradon i've made for jane.

*122 degrees fahrenheit.


End file.
